Making Tokens Investable in 2026 through Ownership, Automation, and Value Accrual

The year 2026 will be the most important year yet for the future of tokens across the crypto industry.

2025 left us at a turning point for 2026. Tokens will either continue to erode investor confidence, until every token that isn’t a stablecoin gets dismissed as a memecoin and trends toward zero, or a new breed of token will emerge and capture the eye of investors: tokens that are actually worth owning. At Aragon, we call these ownership tokens and will focus our efforts in 2026 on making tokens investable through ownership, automation, and value accrual. 

Aragon was founded on a simple premise: protocols can be built, secured, governed, and scaled faster and safer on decentralized rails. Until now these rails have been powered by tokens, once known as “governance tokens”, and we still believe this vision is true. 

We also recognize the crypto industry is being forced to confront something uncomfortable that’s unfolded over the last two years: most tokens struggled to retain value because, frankly – most tokens had no value. Tokens lack ownership over assets (onchain or offchain) and credible value accrual. And in many cases, misaligned incentives continue to push value away from tokenholders and toward third-party equity.

We believe crypto-native tokens can become a real, investable asset class. Tooling for builders has to improve. Implementations have to mature. And projects have to ship tokens with real, enforceable rights.

In 2026, we’re doubling down on supporting projects that want their tokens to be valuable and want that value to directly support the project’s growth and success. 

Here’s how.

The launch of Aragon’s Ownership Token Index

Crypto investors have watched the vast majority of tokens fail to retain value. The reason is simple: intentionally or not, most projects launched memecoins that came with no rights, no ownership, no utility, and no enforceable claim on anything. And the reality is when you invest in a memecoin, you’re either gambling or making a donation.

A minority of projects did something different. They deployed an ownership token: a token with hard-coded, verifiable rights. In some cases, tokenholders control protocol parameters and upgrades like Lido or Aave. In others, tokenholders control capital flows and incentives like we see in DeFi protocols like Curve or Aerodrome. With ownership tokens, you’re investing in the future of whatever rights that token actually has.

One of the biggest problems today is that investors don’t have the time, or the tools, to do proper due diligence. Most investors can’t realistically verify, end-to-end, what a token can control onchain. And even when onchain rights exist, investors are often blind to the offchain reality: legal wrappers, entity structures, and incentive conflicts. Especially “token + equity” misalignment where the token participates in governance, but the equity controls the real value.

That’s what the Ownership Token Index is for. The Index is designed to give investors clear and verifiable information about the rights they have as tokenholders, starting with what’s actually enforceable onchain. 

Our goal is simple: make it straightforward to verify whether a token is an ownership token or not, and surface potential conflicts that impact incentives and long-term value.

If we succeed, ownership tokens should go up, and memecoins should go down, because the market will finally have a clean way to separate the two. It rewards projects that design tokens with real rights from day one and it pressures everyone else to stop pretending.

We announced the Token Ownership Index on December 18th and will be launching V1 very soon!

The evolution of governance proposals to “the art of not governing” that automation enables  

Ownership implies control and making decisions. But the industry has spoken: vanilla delegate-token voting and proposal-based governance has failed as a high-velocity decision-making system.

Proposal-centric governance treats every action like a referendum. When every decision requires a proposal and a vote, the growth of projects slows down. And for most that pace is at odds with what it takes to build, compete, and stay secure.

Unless a protocol is fully immutable, decisions still need to be made. And the alternative—centralized decision-making—comes with growing regulatory and legal tradeoffs. Operating without clear rules has risks. Operating against clear rules may now have more risk.

As the crypto industry moves toward ownership-based decentralization grounded in onchain permissions and enforceable rights,like fee switches and parameter control, the next step is to automate everything that doesn’t require human discretion to streamline governance operations.

The operational reality of organizations is not novelty. It’s structured, predictable actions that happen over and over again: distributions, incentives, rebalancing, budgeting, threshold-based responses, and standard operating procedures. In 2026, we’re focused on helping projects identify where human intent does not need to be reevaluated in order to automate actions, reduce the scope of governance, and design decision-making to be more efficient.

The outcome is better for everyone: onchain control over what matters, reduced governance overhead, reduced risk, and tighter alignment between tokenholder rights and protocol operations. Automation will allow ownership tokens to exist and power decentralized organisations. 

Continuous optimization of Aragon’s product suite and services

In 2026, we’ll continue building on our modular tech stack to support teams designing and deploying mechanisms that make tokens valuable and help protocols run effectively onchain.

On the product side, our focus is governance as counterparty risk management.

Tokenholders don’t want to wake up every day and “govern.” They want protection, recourse, and enforceable control over the things they actually have at risk. So we’re focused on reducing the proactive decision-making surface for onchain stakeholders, while increasing the relevance and enforceability of the rights they do have. This includes the primitives that will allow tokenholders to express their preferences or make decisions once, and automate ongoing repeated actions. 

On the custom services side, we’re doubling down on tokenomics advisory and security as a service.

We’ve spent the last year helping projects navigate the tension between decentralization of ownership and effective execution. We’ve built a clear view on value accrual drivers across different protocol types: different fee profiles, growth stages, and competitive dynamics. And we’ve helped teams implement battle-tested mechanisms like ve/staking and gauge-based systems, because they solve real problems: aligning long-term incentives, directing capital flows, rewarding productive behavior, and making the token matter.

We’re also helping projects implement security councils and safeguards as systems mature, so that projects can implement new systems safely. We are already core security members for Spark and Taiko, and we’ll continue to expand our customer base in 2026.

Aragon will continue to build what matters for token value in 2026

2025 was a reality check. The market shifted toward fundamentals-driven primitives. At Aragon, we denounced unrealistic and broken governance systems. We moved away from governance theater and toward what actually matters: capital distribution for value accrual and modular governance for security. Ve/gauge systems became our bread and butter because, fundamentally, they address many of the issues that have held tokens back: misalignment, lack of enforceable rights, and weak links between tokenholders and the real economics of the protocol.

In 2026, we’re moving past broken governance and helping tokens become valuable by making ownership real: giving tokens enforceable rights, reducing the governance burden on everyone, and helping projects reach their goals with secure, flexible mechanisms.

If you’re building a protocol and you want your token to be an investable asset—one with clear rights, clear value accrual, and a security and counterparty risk model you can defend—reach out. We’d love to help. Get in touch.